Wednesday, July 16, 2008

This is a list of various responses I have made to arguments that J. David Velleman advances against a right to suicide.

Life Rights and Death Rights
- in which I briefly introduce, and more briefly consider, Velleman's argument that giving (terminally ill or disabled) people a right to die harms them
even if they are fully rational and can be trusted to make choices that maximize their various interests.

Velleman's Sorrow of Options
- in which I review Velleman's pro-forced-life argument in more detail, attempt to identify problems with the argument, and apply the argument given different starting conditions to get shocking conclusions.

Respecting and Erasing, in which I respond to J. David Velleman's pro-forced-life paper "A Right of Self-Termination?" In his article, Velleman proposes that suicide is nearly always morally wrong, because by taking one's own life, one acts in such a way that denies the inherent value of a person in general. I argue that killing oneself (and destroying something in general) does not at all require denying a person's (or a thing's) value, and that a person or a thing that is absent often paradoxically has a high value.

Altruism and the Value of Life: Another Response to Velleman
- in which I challenge the ideas set forth in "A Right of Self-Termination?" in a different way, this time by contrasting Velleman's position (that suicide to end suffering is wrong because it involves trading "mere" agent-relative benefits for a human life) with the commonly-held intuition of the moral worthiness of altruistic suicides.

Thanks so much, my sister - Chip pointed me to your work on mothers who kill. I wonder if you've read the evolutionary biology treatise called "Homicide" by Daly & Wilson? It deals with the conflict between parental and child evolutionary interests, and especially focuses on intra-family murder.

I agree that forcing people to stay alive is often indistinguishable from torture.